New Week in Ethereum 2025-12-26

Week in Ethereum News

The Ethereum core developers have chosen "Hegotá" as the official portmanteau for the upcoming network upgrade after Glamsterdam, combining "Heze" (the H-star name) and "Bogotá" (the Devcon city name).

Holiday schedule:
- Core developers agreed on a reduced meeting schedule for the holiday period, with several calls canceled between December 22, 2025, and January 1, 2026

“Demystifying Blockchain KV Lookups: From O(log N) to O(1) Disk I/O”: reports controlled Pebble experiments (22GB → 2.2TB) arguing that once Bloom filters + top index blocks are cached, random lookup I/O collapses toward ~1–2 disk reads (and can further approach ~1–1.3 when index blocks fit), materially changing how we should model EL database bottlenecks.
“Wormholes and the cost of plausible deniability”: argues wormholes’ “plausible deniability” property appears in tension with Ethereum’s 160-bit address space, and that EIP-7503’s implied anonymity set is lower than expected in practice; ends with a sketched alternative direction using beacon-chain deposits.
“Does FHE deserve this much attention?”: surveys why FHE is resurging (general computation over encrypted state), but highlights that many “FHEVM-style” designs still rely on MPC committees for key management/decryption; points to newer directions aiming to reduce committee trust (e.g., the linked “Root iO” paper).

Gnosis Chain hard fork to recover ~$9.4M frozen after the Balancer exploit: Multiple reports state the hard fork activated Dec 22, 2025, with the announcement following shortly after; it’s framed as a governance-approved recovery of funds that were frozen post-exploit.

Ethereum NFT trading volume rebounds week-over-week: Ethereum-based NFT collections saw a notable rebound in activity this week, with reported trading volume rising roughly week-over-week and Ethereum retaining the largest share of total NFT sales across chains
Ethereum address growth reaches new local highs": On-chain metrics published this week show Ethereum averaging close to 200,000 new addresses per day, signaling continued ecosystem participation despite broader market volatility.

🚨 Lido at 24.31%, still too close to the 33.3% threshold.
Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
- Execution layer: Geth ~41% & Nethermind ~38%
- Consensus layer: Lighthouse ~51.24% & Prysm ~25.06%
- Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality.
Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe.

EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):
- EIP-8081: Update portmanteau for Hegotá.
- EIP-7998: Avoid pre-fork randao seed computation.
- EIP-8032: Use S_pre in SSTORE gas formula.
ERCs (Application Layer):
- EIP-7932: Fix undefined SIZE in EIP-7932.
- EIP-7928: Clarify wording around 7702.
- EIP-7942: Correct Python syntax errors in pseudocode.

Fees (via ultrasound.money):
- Gas: 0.0 to 1.1 gwei, 0.0 gwei average; zero net issuance at 12.2 gwei
- 18.64 ETH net issuance this week
ETHUSD: $2,901– $3,060, currently $2,930, all-time high $4,946
ETHBTC: currently 0.033 (Flippening at ~0.165)

ETHZilla sells $74.5 million of ether to trim debt load, their second sale following a $40 million sale in October for share repurchases.
BitMine buys $300 million in ether, crossing the 4 million ETH treasury milestone as crypto markets slid.
Boxing Day options expiration will see $27 billion in bitcoin and ether options reset, with a bullish bias indicated by a put-call ratio of 0.38.

Ethereum's 'Glamsterdam' upgrade aims to fix MEV fairness with enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) and Block-level Access Lists, targeted for 2026.
Aave community split over tokenholder rights debate, described as the "most important tokenholder rights debate" in the protocol's history.
Uniswap's token burn and protocol fee proposal backed overwhelmingly by voters, transforming UNI into a value-accruing asset with more than 125 million votes in support.

Dec 31, 2025: Year-end options expiration for $27 billion in bitcoin and ether contracts
Jan 7, 2026: BPO2 fork activation on Ethereum mainnet - increases blob count to target/max 14/21
Jan 15-17, 2026: ETHDenver BUIDLWeek - applications and hackathon registrations open
Feb 23-Mar 3, 2026: ETHDenver main event - world's largest web3 #BUIDLathon
Q2 2026: Glamsterdam upgrade - targeting MEV fairness improvements